1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to business methods and more particularly to service industry back-end automation.
2. Related Art
In the products industry, there exist many electronic (e-business) solutions to automating transactions occurring at every point along the supply chain and in the manufacturing cycle. For example, customers can purchase goods from a store through the Internet with credit cards. The store's distribution centers can automatically start order fulfillment, update their inventories and order more stock. Payments can be made electronically from the credit companies to the store's bank. All of these solutions, and others, help to improve efficiency, decrease the cost of business, reduce errors, and improve customer satisfaction.
In the services industry, however, there are no analogous e-business solutions. There are electronic solutions at different points in the process of labor to payment, but there are no integrated solutions that allow the entire process to proceed electronically and without paper. Where the primary unit of measure is a labor hour, there is no completely electronic way to collect time worked, validate the time worked, approve the charged time, bill the client, collect payment, correct incorrect time charged, reconcile payments to time charges, and so on.
For example, those who work in the services industry fill out a timesheet, either on paper or electronically. Electronic timesheets are then usually printed on paper. Time sheets must be signed by the worker, then usually approved by those higher up in the corporate structure, such as team leads, group managers, division heads etc. However, only one person can review and approve a paper document at a time, and typically only person at each level is responsible for reviewing and approving the document. If an employee works on different projects for different managers, only one manager will approve the timesheet. A manager might not therefore be able to see or approve all charges for his project if the employee reports to another manager for timesheet approval. Even worse, someone not related to any of the employee's projects may be the one approving the charges. If approval from managers outside of the employee's organization is required, they must view the timesheet in the employee's format, which may not contain account numbers that are meaningful to the external organization.
The manual process of review and approval takes a great deal of time. Eventually the timesheets make their way to an accounting department, where the charges to various accounts must be collected and invoiced to the customers. Travel and other direct expenses (ODCs) are billed in the same way as timesheets, and cause similar difficulties.
Correcting timesheets and other documents can be cumbersome and timeconsuming. Traditional methods often include having to print out a copy of the incorrect document, having the document owner indicate all changes by hand in ink, signing off on each change and then sending the corrected document back through the chain of approval. This can significantly delay correct billing of the customer.
A worker who works with several different clients may have their time appear on separate invoices. However, a service company usually wants to keep its clients hidden from each other. If an individual employee's timesheet had to be forwarded to a client, for instance in the case of a charge dispute, it would be undesirable to include that worker's single complete timesheet showing information for all clients. One conventional solution to this problem is to print out the timesheet, and to physically black-out the time entries that do not belong to the disputing client.
In addition to these challenges, companies each define their work-week and their billing schedules differently. Company A may define their work week from Saturday to Friday and have a bi-weekly billing schedule, while Company B may have a Monday to Sunday work week and a monthly billing schedule. If employees from Company B are contracted to work for Company A, reconciling time charges becomes even more complicated because the time periods do not match up exactly.
Further, in the services industry, a set of companies in a working relationship with each other may have different roles with respect to each other, sometimes simultaneously. One division of Company A could contract work out to Company B, while another division of Company B has sub-contracted work to another division of Company A. In a third arena, Companies A and B could be competitors. Sharing data among becomes problematic because each company also wants to preserve their confidential records while at the same time sharing information to ease data processing. Each company has its own accounting systems, time periods, client codes and other internal differences that make reconciliation of data and charges difficult and time-consuming. Further, delays resulting from the difficulty of sharing information can mean that the companies are unable to meet their reporting requirements to each other, because the data for the reports are not available due to the delays.
Other drawbacks to the traditional electronic and paper workings of the service industry back-end are the problems inherent in the long delays between invoice and payment. Although the worker is paid at each pay period, the actual funds from the invoice for the work done may not be paid by the clients for weeks, or even months, after the work was done. This is because, at the client-end, the invoices must go through the client's back-end accounting structures as well.
Another consequence of the long delay between invoice and billing is that project managers can rarely get an up-to-date view of the state of their projects. This causes the potential for budget overruns and shortfalls. Further, at the corporate level, the organization cannot see a timely picture of how much revenue is being generated or how current costs are affecting the bottom line. This problem is exacerbated in tiered working relationships between companies, due to the significant delays caused by the manual sharing of data.
Finally, the services industry must often adhere to a number of government regulations, especially if a government agency is itself involved as part of the network of entities on a project. It can be very difficult to ensure that the regulations are adhered to at all points in the work flow when a complete picture of work done is not readily and timely available. Such regulation requirements include maintaining document integrity and ensuring that only the timekeeper makes entries into timesheets; making daily time-entries; tracking the history of the document; and allowing only formal signatures by the timekeeper and managers.
What is needed then, is an electronic solution that allows real-time management and review of service industry work flows.